 Besides being a software engineer, I'm also a co-organizer of a conference called R Networks on all aspects of the distributed web. This presentation is going to be a little more philosophical than some of the other more maybe hands-on talks. It's also a shortened version of a longer presentation, so I've tried to keep in all of the most interesting content, but I will link to the longer one on the last slide. So this is a totally not comprehensive overview of the decentralized space, and though this presentation will be hopefully very relevant to blockchains and this is an Ethereum conference, I think it's good to remember that this movement spans other tech stacks too. So we have the network layer, things like community mesh networks, protocol layer where we have blockchains, but also things like IPFS, application layer, this is where we might fit most dApps. And then we also have this social or governance layer where we might put things like Lumio or most DAOs. This is the agenda for our talk, and like I said, this presentation is cut down, so instead we're going to focus primarily on the first question on the list, and we can leave the final two maybe for discussion during the breakout or conference section. So what is decentralization? Are we sure that we know? You might also call this new version decentralization without so many discontents. So yeah, it turns out to be a more complicated question than you might think, one that has many unsatisfying explanations. When we look at the word, we don't get a lot of help. All this word means is not centralization, and I'm not the first person to point this out. There's a name for this type of definition, and it's an antonymic definition, but the problem with an antonymic definition is, you know, we have this thing that we can call centralization, but what are all these other things that aren't the same thing and also aren't centralization? What are the names for all these different not centralizations? The origin of the terms in the mid-1800s, Alex de Tuchel would write that the French Revolution began with a push towards decentralization, but became, in the end, an extension of centralization, which I think is possibly still interesting to keep in mind as we confront, for example, blockchain maximalism. It also reminded me of this Hannah Arendt passage, which is, the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. And indeed, the word decentralization is still used more often in a political or organizational context than a technical one. After I came up with the title for this talk, I found out it's also a book, one with the subtitle, an essay on class, political agency and national perspective in Indonesian politics. The Google definitions of the word are the transfer of authority from central to local government and the movement of departments of a large organization away from a single administrative center to other locations. So these are both political and organizational definitions, and it's possibly ironic to be part of a community that focuses so much on decentralization, but struggles so much with governance. And also worth noting off the bat that in a political and organizational context, the concept of decentralization has been a component of many different political movements, some varied odds with one another. So for example, there's a strong free market rationale for decentralization. This is from an essay on information markets, the sentence before it cites Adam Smith and the one after it cites Friedrich von Hayek. And the argument here is, you know, we have all these rational actors independently moving throughout society without any kind of central coordinating. But there's also an entire movement called decentralized socialism. And this is a passage from an essay talking about how Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution was a reaction to the centralization of Soviet Russia. So really a dizzying range of thinkers have called for some kind of decentralization, and of course that's what makes the concept so interesting. Kind of like universal basic income, it has this fascinating cross-partisan support, which gives it this kind of gravitational pull. It's like a dense, messy knot that's fascinating to untangle. So we may not all want decentralization for the same reason. And I can't take credit for this caption, but I also don't want to dox its creator. I'll let you all interpret this phenomenon, which is certainly the case that we have competing motivations. You might say it's a success or a weakness of the decentralization movement. You might say we've decentralized our motivations. So it may be difficult to define decentralization, but can you measure it? This is one way people often like to. It's called the Lorenz Curve or Ginny Coefficient, and it's often used to measure the decentralization of wealth. So there are a few components of this graph, and one of them is this straight line that we call the line of equality. And this is the curve that we would get if the distribution of wealth in a system were totally uniform. So if 10% of the population had 10% of the wealth, 50% had 50%, et cetera, et cetera. The Lorenz Curve is what we get when we plot the actuals, and the Ginny Coefficient is the difference between these two lines. This is from an excellent recent article called Quantifying Decentralization by Balaji Srinivasan, and he took the top 100 cryptocurrencies and he plotted them on the Lorenz Curve, and you will see that they are very far away from the line of perfect equality. And again, from Quantifying Decentralization, Srinivasan describes how a decentralized system is composed of a set of decentralized subsystems. So we have minors, we have the developer community, we have the concept of geographical decentralization or governmental decentralization. And I think maybe it's helpful here to borrow the term intersectional and to think about intersectional decentralization. If we imagine decentralization as like this Cartesian plane of intersecting decentralizations, we'll find that we can't get the complete picture without considering all of them, and that none of them really make sense to discuss in the absence of others. In the blockchain world, we talk about the scalability trilemma. So this is from the Ethereum Wiki and you may be familiar with it. When designing a blockchain, these are areas you have to make trade-offs within. It's sort of like a cap theorem for blockchains. And notably, one of them is decentralization with its own very specific definition. And here it is that each node on the network should not have to have too much compute resources available to it, maybe a laptop. Scalability is one, and here it's defined as the network being able to process more transactions than any individual node. And security, which is the amount of compute resources an attacker needs to have to successfully attack the network. So of course, decentralization is on this list. And a good way to think of that is as a stat that we could lower in order to improve these other qualities. So when we talk about scalability in the blockchain world, it's almost a catechism to compare it to the transactions per second of something like Visa. Visa process is 24,000 transactions per second. Another way to understand that statement is that Visa has dropped its decentralization stat to zero and maxed out its scalability. So in conclusion, here are some questions in rapid fire. Do we want decentralization? I think this deserves to be an open question, or at least one we don't forget that it's possible to ask. And if we accept that there's no canonical decentralization or no perfect decentralization, then which one do we want? Are there limits to decentralization? And if so, what are they? Right now we talk a lot about decentralizing the network and application layer. But how often do we consider the centralization of the manufacturing pipeline or of supply chains? How far down the proverbial stack do we care about decentralization? And finally, a recursive question. Can we decentralize the building of decentralized networks? I see specialization and centralization as tightly connected concepts, and a technical expert is often a central point of failure for a decentralized network. And if pursuit of power tends to centralize a system, how can we prevent this from happening to our networks over time? What underlines all of this, that there are many possible decentralizations and perhaps no perfect one, but all of them may prove meaningless or become just ideological background noise, if not carefully and thoughtfully examined. So thank you. My name is Sarah again. That's my handle and that's a YouTube link to the longer version of this presentation. Thank you all so much.